Tag-Archive for » gunman «
RIO DE JANEIRO — A gunman opened fire Thursday in a public elementary school in Rio de Janeiro, killing at least 11 children before taking his own life, officials said.
The victims were 10 girls between the ages of 12 and 14 and one boy, the O Globo news website in Rio de Janeiro reported.
The crime shocked Brazil, which had never seen such a mass shooting. President Dilma Rousseff wept when commenting on the incident during a speech to business leaders and requested a moment of silence for the victims.
“This type of crime is not characteristic of (our) country and therefore we are all … united in repudiating this act of violence,” she said.
The gunman, identified as Wellington Menezes de Oliveira, was a 23-year-old former student at the school.
Police said Oliveira entered the school carrying two guns and a suicide note. He told officials he was there to deliver a speech and then opened fire on students.
O Globo reported the gunman was shot by police in the leg and then killed himself with a shot to the head.
Officials told O Globo that 18 children were hospitalized after Thursday’s shooting.
The man left a letter explaining his actions, O Globo said, including a reference that he had contracted the AIDS virus. Other details were not immediately available.
Terrified parents rushed to the school and television images showed them crying and screaming for information about their children.
The number of victims changed during the course of the day but police now say 11 children died.
U.S. police shot and killed a man who took three people hostage, waving a gun and apparently fitted out with explosives, in the headquarters of the Discovery Channel near Washington on Wednesday.
Officers who had been watching the hostage drama on a building security camera crept in while police negotiated with the emotional gunman and shot him when he pointed his pistol at one of the three men he held hostage.
“A hostage moved, he pulled his gun, and a shot was taken,” Montgomery County police chief Tom Manger told reporters. He said the suspect was killed and the hostages were safe.
The man, named by a U.S. law enforcement official as James Lee, had been arrested before for protesting against Discovery Channel over environmental issues.
“He had a history … of conflict with Discovery,” Manger said.
The incident caused chaos in Silver Spring, Maryland, a shopping and office district and commuter hub on the edge of the U.S. capital.
Police sealed off the area around the building and SWAT teams deployed shortly after the suspect entered the building carrying a handgun at about 1 p.m. Manger said county and state police, FBI and Homeland Security agents joined the operation.
The building, where nearly 1,900 employees work, was evacuated and children were rushed from a day-care centre.
Police said they were still trying to determine whether two boxes and two backpacks that the hostage-taker had were explosive devices. Bomb-sniffing dogs checked the area before workers were allowed to leave neighbouring buildings.
OSLO, Norway — A suspected right-wing Christian gunman in police uniform killed at least 85 people in a ferocious attack on a youth summer camp of Norway’s ruling Labour party, hours after a car bomb killed seven in Oslo.
Police said the suspect immediately surrendered when told to do so and has confessed, Reuters reported.
Witnesses said the gunman, identified by police as a 32-year-old Norwegian, moved across the small, wooded Utoya holiday island on Friday firing at random as young people scattered in fear.
Police detained the tall, blond suspect, named by local media as Anders Behring Breivik, and charged him for the island killing spree and the Oslo bomb blast.
Norwegian police would neither confirm nor deny if the killer acted alone, but were looking into reports of a second suspect.
Norway’s national news agency, NTB, reported Saturday that witnesses told police two people were involved in the shooting on the island, which lasted for about 90 minutes.
At the time of the massacre, hundreds of children were on the island, aged from 11 or 12 to 18 or 19
National police Chief Oystein Maeland said the attack had reached “catastrophic dimensions.